Expand the scope of employee autonomy

“Companies must radically reduce the number of permissions that are required to start something new.”

Too many people in organizations feel powerless to initiate change. Rigid policy guidelines, tight spending limits, and a lack of self-directed time limit individual autonomy and undermine the organization’s capacity to renew itself. Companies must redesign management systems so they facilitate local experimentation and bottom-up initiatives.

The Morning Star Company is one of the world’s leading processors of tomatoes—and one of the most progressive models of a self-managed enterprise we’ve seen. In this Mashup session, Paul Green, the co-founder of the Self-Management Institute and, until recently, Morning Star’s head of development, describes the company’s extraordinary—and extraordinarily effective—approach to replacing manager-management with peer- and self-management.

The founders of TopCoder and Tongal, the world's largest communities of talented and impassioned software developers and digital creators, make the case for the value of “creative populism,” share the new rules for activating, enlisting, and organizing talent in the social, mobile and digital age—and unpack their disruptive models for the future of work and value creation.